Monkey Kombat!

David first turned me on to current monkey problems in New Delhi. The more I read about it the more absurd it gets, making it the most captivating “news” I’ve recently been exposed to. Let me bring you up to date.

It started with this MSNBC article about how a monkey attack led to the falling death of the deputy mayor of New Delhi. Evidently New Delhi suffers from a monkey problem where gangs of Rhesus macaques prowl the city and will break into buildings and attack people in the search for food. While I’m sure this is a serious problem and that I wouldn’t want to be attacked by a gang of monkeys…it’s also rocket fuel for my imagination. I find gangs of monkeys to be positively fascinating. For me the MSNBC article’s climax was the following sentence:

“Over the years, city authorities have employed monkey catchers who use langurs - a larger and fiercer kind of monkey — to scare or catch the macaques, but the problem persists.”

Fight a monkey problem with larger meaner monkeys….it’s just too good to be true. I wonder if history can provide any examples of where solving a problem by getting a bigger meaner predator backfired? (Ok, so the langurs aren’t strictly a predator of the macaques…they’re just scary as hell.) I can’t help but picture martial art schools where the langur monkeys are taught how to effectively deal with macaques. Perhaps I’m a sucker for violent monkey jujitsu action.

Then I read a Slate Explainer article about the very same monkey problem. The title of the article is “How To Fight Monkeys: What should you do if you’re surrounded by angry macaques?” This just further reinforces my mental image of martial art schools teaching the highly effective art of monkey defense. At the end of the Explainer article is the following sentence:

“Instead, the government has relocated some of the troublemakers and even brought in langurs, a mellower but larger monkey, to scare off the smaller macaques.”

Well this doesn’t seem to jive with the MSNBC article. MSNBC claims the langurs are fiercer, Slate claims they are mellower. I’m emotionally invested in the story at this point, it works better for me if the larger monkeys are fiercer…it better fits into my preconceived and fictional monkey fight dream world. I realize I have to do a bit more “research” on the topic and discover the nature of the langur monkey.

I hit pay dirt when I find this Time article . The Time article is a delicious smorgasbord of quotable monkey laden lines. Let me pull a few choice ones out your amusement.

“And to deal with such a rare urban problem, Delhi has come up with an unusual response: it's launched a monkey arms race.”

“The arrival of the langur took things to another level. With their sharp teeth and long, muscular tail that can swot an errant ape from a couple of feet away, langurs are scary to humans — not just a smaller rhesus monkey”

“"If they hit you with their tail it will break the skin," said Khan, matter-of-factly. I didn't get close enough to test his claim.”

I suppose the langur monkeys are fiercer in the sense that you’ll fair worst if full-on-monkey-attacked by a langur, but they are more mellow in the sense that they don’t form gangs that terrorize the city. I suppose I could try and look up actual reference information about langur monkeys instead of gleaning information from sensational monkey articles, but honestly where would be the fun in that?

In case your head isn’t already buzzing with absurd monkey thoughts let’s let the Time article offer one more mind expanding monkey “fact.”

“In response, the city started rounding up monkeys and caging them in a large, dedicated prison on the outskirts of Delhi.”

Monkey prisons. Monkey prisons, people. That is all.